Again, we're just putting together a paper. We've been examining sockeye and sea lice on this coast, along with Mike Price and some other colleagues. We presented the preliminary results at Sea Lice 2010 here in Victoria just two days ago.
Sockeye come out of the Fraser. They go north through the Strait of Georgia and encounter the large concentration of salmon farms around the Campbell River, Discovery Islands areas. They make it up there relatively quickly. There's a small sub-population of Harrison Rapids sockeye that go out through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and they don't go up the east coast of Vancouver Island. They do not encounter salmon farms. Curiously, their survival is quite good compared to the rest of the Fraser sockeye.
As you probably heard, the productivity of Fraser sockeye has gone down steadily since the mid-nineties in particular, to the point where they're barely able to replace themselves.
The other major populations of sockeye come out of the Skeena River. There are no salmon farms there. We have been working with Allen Gottesfeld at the Skeena Fisheries Commission. He's a biologist there for the first nations. We've compared the number of lice on sockeye coming out of the Skeena with those coming out of the Fraser. We have the DNA evidence, so we know those stocks. The numbers are a couple of orders of magnitude less of sea lice on the Skeena sockeye that do not migrate past salmon farms. But the ones from the Fraser that migrate past salmon farms have elevated levels of lice, in particular downstream of salmon farms. That means that before they get to the salmon farms we've been sampling them and they don't have a lot of lice, but once they get past the salmon farms the louse levels are elevated.